Tag: Restaurant Week

San Leandro Restaurant Week is here, but is it worth it?

Dearth of good deals means no FOMO if you skip it.

San Leandro Restaurant Week is upon us and, if possible, it’s even lamer than last year. There are very few deals that will make me want to try a new restaurant or revisit an old one.

Here are the best ones, which I might try:

Paradiso has a $45 prix-fix menu available daily from 4 to 5 PM. During restaurant week, you can order it all day.

Nella’s Place, a Southern food place, offers half off a second dinner, so $9 to $11 off the price of two dinners. I haven’t tried it, and this seems like a good opportunity.

Scend offers several promos with small discounts, for example you can save $1 on a 2-wing/fries/soda lunch deal, buy one dessert get another for 1/2 off. It might be a good opportunity to try their oxtails, though, as they do offer a small order of 2 oxtails over rice for $17, and usually you need to get a full order for over $40.

The offers from the other nicer restaurants in town leave much to be desired.

Horatio’s has a 2-course menu with only 4 choices of entrees for $33 – which saves you an average of $5 over regular menu prices, depending on what you order and whether you go for dinner or lunch.

Moussaka gives you a free babaganoush or hummus ($8) with purchase of an entree

Top Hatters gives you a free order of lemon ricotta doughnuts ($10) but only for lunch for a party of at least two people.

Some restaurants are adding cheap freebies

Elio’s will give you a free cup of tapioca pudding or scoop of ice-cream if you order their daily-special dinner.

Leisure Cafe offers a free ice tea or milk (~$5) if you buy its baked pork chop or black pepper spaghetti.

Tequila Grill has a 3-course menu for $25, featuring half-entrees, which basically means that by ordering the very limited choices for appetizer and entre, you get a free flan.

Tsuru Sushi offers 3 orders of chicken teriyaki for the price of 2 or a free California roll if you buy ramen. The latter is not bad, but who wants three orders of chicken teriyaki?

Discounts at other restaurants are pretty paltry:

You can save $3 at 21st Amendment brewery, but only if you want to eat fish tacos with an El Sully beer.

Fieldwork Brewing is offering an appetizer + pizza for $30, usually $27 to $41 (assuming all items are included in the promo).

You can save $1 on a Bento Box at Makiyaki.

Sushi Delight offers its 9-piece sashimi dinner for $22 or $6 off its regular price and its “tempura & teriyaki” dinner for $19, or $2 off its regular price.

You can save 15% on the dish-of-the-day at Habibi’s Birria.

And then some restaurants don’t offer any savings whatsoever.

Drake’s Barrel House, Sons of Liberty Alehouse, Zenti Bistro and Mai Thai, as well as Koolfi Creamery are serving a dish or two not usually in the menu.

Pistahan is offering its same weekend buffet at its regular price.

Josephine Southern Cuisine is opening a pop-up on July 18th & 19th from 11 am to 4 pm only, at E14th Eatery and Kitchen and serving their fried chicken with mac & cheese and collard greens for $25, which seems like their regular price.

There are also a few bars/drink places with offerings, but as I’m not someone who goes out to drink I didn’t analyze them.


San Leandro Restaurant Week is a Bust

Low participation and limited deals made for a disappointing week.

For years now, large cities around the country – including our neighbors San Francisco and Oakland – have run “restaurant weeks,” where local restaurants serve specially discounted offerings to attract new (and returning) patrons. Usually, restaurants offer a prix-fix menu at a deeply discounted price, with offerings for lunch and dinner – though restaurants for which that model doesn’t work have other promotions.

San Leandro is probably too small a city to have a “restaurant week” – we only have three upscale restaurant, and I daresay the plethora of mom & dad restaurants around probably operate with thin margins. I have to give it to the San Leandro Chamber of Commerce for at least giving it a try, but the San Leandro Restaurant Week ended up being a bust. Few restaurants participated and among those that did, most had extremely lame deals.

Only three restaurants offered the usual 2 or 3 course prix fix deal. Horatio’s, our waterfront steakhouse, had a great 2-course lunch for $25 and 3-course dinner for $40 which we happily partook of. Paradiso, where we’d dined recently, offered its $45 3-4-5 prix-fix menu, usually only available from 4 to 5 PM, all day during restaurant week, though they did add on a 20% service charge. And Tequila Grill had a 2-couse meal for $35 which included a choice of one of three appetizers and entrees; by choosing the two most expensive dishes, you could save $8 over regular price.

Bust most of the restaurants that participated instead offered a modest discount on a few specific dishes, often just one per day. And some weren’t discounts at all. On Tuesday, we went to Habibi’s Birria for their restaurant week $2.50 tacos, only to find out they have that deal every Tuesday. Emile Villa’s restaurant week special menu offerings were the same price as those in their online menu. If you chose the most expensive items in Fieldwork Brewing‘s offering of an appetizer and pizza for $32, you could have ended up saving $9, but if you chose the cheaper options, you would have ended up paying more than by ordering without the deal.

Some of the restaurants were in my list of places to try, but their deals were so disappointing that I didn’t bother going that week. San Gaspar, where I went once over fifteen years ago and had been planning to return, had a single dinner promo, chile verde for $15 (regularly $19) – something that I didn’t find appealing. Zenti Bistro, which was greatly recommended on a local San Leandro group, offered just their chicken chipotle sandwich for $16 – as their menu is not online, I don’t know how good a deal that was, but the sandwich didn’t appeal to me.

But the absolutely worst deal of all had be that offered by Le Soleil, once my favorite restaurant in San Leandro but one I haven’t visited in many years. Rather than discounting a meal, Le Soleil offered that for any amount over $50 that you spent, they would give you a gift card worth 120% that amount – so if you spent $50, they’d give you a $60 gift card. The catch was that you could only use that gift card for 10% of the value of your future meals at Le Soleil. This basically means that if you went to Le Soleil twice and spent $50 each time, you’d save a whole $5 in both meals combined. No thank you.

The problem with the San Leandro Restaurant Week wasn’t just the lame deals, but how clunky and difficult to use the website was. There was no indication on the webpage what deals were offered by each restaurant, if you clicked on the name of a restaurant you were taken to their website, but with a couple of exceptions, their websites didn’t mention Restaurant Week at all. Only by clicking around at all graphics, did I manage to find their list of deals. More attention was paid to a silly game that required you downloading an app and then uploading a photo of your receipt for a chance to get the cost of your restaurant week meals reimbursed. The good news is that probably very few people did it, so you probably do have a good chance to win.

Now, all this complaining aside, restaurant week did work for me in that it made me finally go to Habibi’s Birria, where I fell for their tacos and learned about their ongoing Taco Tuesday promotion and that it sent me back to Horatio’s and reminded me how much I’d enjoyed the place back in my early days in San Leandro.

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